Introduction to Game Development

About: If you love games and want to learn how to make them, then this course will start you down that path. Making games is a creative and technical art form. In this course you will familiarize yourself with the tools and practices of game development. You will get started developing your own video games using the industry standard game development tools, including the Unity3D game engine and C#. At the end of the course you will have completed three hands-on projects and will be able to leverage an array of game development techniques to create your own basic games. This course is for individuals interested in becoming a game designer, game artist, or game programmer.

Develop web games

Welcome to the MDN game development center! In this area of the site we provide resources for web developers wanting to develop games. You’ll find many useful tutorials and technique articles in the main menu on the left, so feel free to explore.

How to Start Your Game Development

Whether you’re looking for a game industry career or simply curious about the way game developers think, Extra Credits makes video game design approachable by exploring concepts like gamification, perfect imbalance, the skinner box, the uncanny valley, and more. Sometimes we also like to recommend a few games you might not have tried! Join us on Extra Credits every Wednesday as we take a deeper look at games: how they are made, what they mean, and how we can make them better.

The things game developer do:

Programmer

The whole world revolves around the programmer. The programmer is the one who takes the unrealistic expectations of everybody else and finds a way to make them work. If the producer wants to change the user interface at the last minute, it’s the programmer who stays up all night making the change. If the artist can’t figure out how SVGA palettes work, it’s the programmer who writes a color-reducing and palette-matching utility. Without the programmer, there would be no computer games.

Artist

Artists are important too. In some games, such as Myst, I will grudgingly admit the artists played a more critical role than the programmer. This is the exception however, not the rule. The rule is, the programmer is the pivotal element in all game development.These days, many artists prefer to be called “animators”. Many garbagemen prefer to be called “sanitation engineers” too, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference in what they actually do.

Musician

They make music. They can make sound effects too. There are a lot of them, and there is barely enough work to go around. Most of them are starving.

Producer

The producer oversees game development and makes sure all the elements of the development are in place. A producer may, for example, acquire resources for programmers and artists, may hand out money, and may give orders. Sometimes a programmer or an artist may play the role of producer, which often works well. Sometimes a producer is a low-level manager with no particular game development talent, who nonetheless involves himself in micro-managing the development process. This occasionally spells disaster.

Designer

This is a nebulous term. Sometimes the producer thinks he is the designer, when actually the programmer is the designer. The artist should be the designer, being that he has the creative talent, but nobody pays attention to the artist. Sometimes a person comes out of nowhere and declares himself to be designer, and asks for millions of dollars for selling a title and a story line. Ha! Fat chance. If you are a programmer and you need design help, look to an experienced designer with a track record in the type of game you want to develop. There are people who actually excel at designing levels, puzzles, likeable characters and entertaining story lines. Tom Hall, formerly of id Software, comes to mind as a successful and well-loved game designer. Really good designers like Tom are rare.

Play Tester

Play testers sometimes also act as beta testers. Technically speaking, the beta tester tests for bugs and the play tester tests for playability. But since most games are under-funded and behind schedule, both functions are generally ignored more often than they should be. If you want to break into game development, and you live in the Silicon Valley area, you may be able to get a job as a play tester. It’s kind of like breaking into rock ‘n roll by being a roadie. Sure you’re there, but you’ll never be the star.

Publisher

This is the guy in the suit who smokes a cigar and blows the smoke in your face. He is very good at telling you why his part of the job is really the hard part, and since he is taking all the risks, he should keep 95% of the profits and you should be grateful for your 5%. Less deductions. Paid 6 months after he gets paid. Which is 9 months after the game hits the shelves.It’s a good job, if you can get it.

Lone
Wolf

This is me. At some point in my career, I have performed all of the above roles and more. Now I have learned where my strengths lie, and I find other people to give me artwork, music, design help and publishing help. But I still take over each job when I need to. If the artwork isn’t perfect, I fire up my paint program and make adjustments myself. If I can’t reach a deal with a publisher, I self publish on the web. Sometimes I even make my own sound effects by hooking a cheap microphone up to my Sound Blaster card. The point is, I don’t take a salary, I am not dependent on anybody else, and I have the freedom to choose and abandon my own projects, and to move on when I feel like it. Being a lone wolf isn’t for everybody, but to me it is the best of all possible worlds.

Minimum requirements:

To begin with, you need to know how to program in some language. The preferred languages for game programmers are C and C++. I have no opinion on which is better, either one will take you far. If you are just getting started, and you haven’t learned C or C++ yet, you can write games in another language. Lots of perfectly good games have been written in BASIC, Pascal, and Delphi. Years ago I wrote some pretty games in Fortran. It doesn’t matter that much what language you use, as long as you have mastered it.

Some knowledge of assembly language programming is important if you are planning on writing your own low-level graphics routines. If you not ready to tackle assembly language yet, don’t worry about it. You can use a commercial graphics library.

You will need some way to generate artwork for your program. A paint program is good. A rendering program is better. A talented artist is better yet. Whether you create your pictures yourself, scan them, use clip art, or pay big bucks to a professional artist, plan on having some source of artwork.

That’s it! That’s all you really need to get started. If you are reading this online, then I will assume you also have a good, fast computer, a modem, and some form of online communication. These are valuable and will help you a lot.

Of course, there is one other element which I haven’t discussed, and that is talent. You have to be a good programmer, with creative problem-solving skills. I assume you think you have that, because otherwise you wouldn’t still be reading.